


Height is a Changing Thing

by Elliott_Fletcher



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Body Dysphoria, Depression, First Meetings, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-28 21:24:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,739
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8463442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elliott_Fletcher/pseuds/Elliott_Fletcher
Summary: (And height is the wonderful thing between them and their minds, and it changes like the tide or the windswept, silver tresses, or the glances and wobbling toes and the black, black knee pads that save them always, much like their hands and heads and, almost always, their hearts.)





	

**Author's Note:**

> If you read this whole story, through its admitted oddities and quirks, and think it lovely, will you tell me so? And if you read this whole story and think it unworthy of your kudos, take the moment (just a minute) and tell me why. If you say nothing, I will never improve, and I will not be able to bring you a story you will love.

 

* * *

Height is constantly changing.

* * *

First year: not the first day - that itch of outworldliness lingers and embraces his stomach on the chilled morning. He has woken late and slept none, a toss and a turn away from conscious sleep. The blossoms blew away long ago with the last winter gusts, so his shoes tread powder-snow and gravel in a soundtrack of monotonous crunching: _crunch crunch, crinch—crinch crunch, crunch_ . . . His mouth is dry and still tastes sleepy, and his teeth ring when he yawns in the bitter air (it is dry and thin, and never feels enough in his lungs: too chaste).

It is the fifth day of his first year of high school, unbearable cold envelops him, and he is short and heavier than his father.

He is Sawamura Daichi.

* * *

He knows the nurse by name already, and it has not even been a week. It is where he runs to after fleeing class, face aflame, fingers numb and splotchy with nervousness. His hair falls into his eyes and under the lids, and he squeezes them shut - it stings, and his eyes water, and then he trips and everything hurts much more.

He does not crawl, but contemplates it seriously before standing once more (each step is a wobble in a different direction, but he slides against the door, and he has made it, but he could not tell you how).

She waves to him when he sees her, and her brow is pinched up in concern. She ushers him to an empty bed, and he stands there, still, ice in his veins as he stares it down. It is like the hospital bed his mother lived in, and so he never lies in it. The nurse bites her lip and says something that echoes around in his head before dissipating (he had not the chance to absorb it). She walks away with clicking heels: _click clack, click, click clack, click_.

He tears his eyes away from the bed and they land on a mirror above his eye-level. He can just see the tips of his ashy hair, but below that line he knows there is white skin (whiter than anyone he knows) and red, red cheeks, and probably ears too, and watering eyes too pallucid, and that mole he despises. It itches sometimes, aches beneath the surface, and he is scared it will grow like his grandmother's moles did. 

He wipes at his face with his wrists, and he is frantic, in his bones and in his drawn brow, and in the tears that will not stop coming, because he will not stop, cannot stop making a fool of himself.

It is the fifth day of his first year of high school, he feels swallowed but not removed, and he is short and thinner than his mother.

He is Sugawara Koushi.

* * *

First Year: Library. It is warm and smells like paper, and it is dimly lit despite the wall of windows (the curtains are floral and made of thick upholstery, and no light shines through). Daichi has a foggy feeling in his head, and it throbs and he groans, but nothing appeases it. His water bottle tastes of soap, and only dries his throat further. His eyes blur against the words and lines until vowels are consonants and fingers are fumblers, and he is really, really tired.

He packs his bag slowly (everything is slow), and he leaves the library feeling as though he has forgotten something - but he woke up with that feeling, if he recalls correctly (he does not). He is mindless in his journey down the hall and the steps that stretch his calfs, and he leans against the railing and then the wall until he sees the right sign: Nurse's Office.

He sleeps on the hard, white bed and dreams of the empty house - the door has just closed, all the laughter with it, and now . . . All noise is his own: his steps, creaking; the key around his neck, around the lanyard or brown rope (a noose, he thinks); the bathroom fan that never ends; it all belongs to him. When he wakes, there is a someone in the chair that spins, not the nurse (the nurse is like him, with dark hair and thick bones, thick brow: this someone looks . . .  decomposed: his skin is not brown or yellow, or even white, but translucent, and his eyes must be sleeping, but they're open and clear, and submerged in a film of sickly tears). 

He finds his throat with his hands and scratches with blunt nails until he can swallow. "Hello?" He calls, and the reaction is instantaneous, a slow slide of gaze from the wall to his own, a flutter - down, up - and then back again to his eyes. They slip closed, both of them, and they open together, blonder, bluer.

"Hi," the someone grits, and then coughs, tries again: "Hi," the voice breaks, crisp.

"Are you okay?" Daichi sits up, slow, his spine hunched as if drawn by a puppeteer's string.

The someone is still for a long while, and breathes silently but bodily, and the sound of clicking heels - quieter, quieter yet - _clack, clack, clack, click, click, cli_ . . . resounds, and then he exhales all the weight in his chest and speaks and smiles, beautifically, with pink, bloody lips: "No."

Daichi reels back to the head of the bed. He hears the heels click thrice and then a trembling breath, and he trains his eyes to his bent knees, but they raise again to his gaze. A cabinet creaks, and the blonde eyes slide away. Daichi gulps down his effervescent heart. The sanguine mouth barely moves: "Maybe."

* * *

Morning again. Sugawara opens his bedroom window, and the gusts blow straight through his lungs, strong and insistent, and he wears two sweaters that day. His breakfast sits feeble in his stomach as he pedals down the whithered path. The only noise is his frosting breath and the rickety wheels, turning and turning: _creak, squeak, crick, creak squee_ . . . He thinks the wind will blow him to another world.

That bike carries him along, up, down the hills, until the school is the horizon. It looms, white and blue, transparent against the overcast sky, and yet its presence is a calming one. A people place, probably, he thinks. People are nice when they are.

His shoe locker has a stain at the back. It does not look like mold, so he dismisses the observation and stores his shoes away. The slippers are warm and too wide, so he scuffs them along, shuffling up the stairs until he sits, gracelessly, at his desk.

He sighs and rubs his face with his hands, and when he straightens up, pulls his chin from his collarbone, the teacher has arrived, but also the boy from the Nurse's office. He takes a seat far in the back, behind Sugawara, and he can feel those eyes on his neck, but he cannot turn around to peer back, and he cannot focus on the weebling words of the professor, so he stares out the window and draws flowers, a whole field of them, in his textbook.

He blinks, and the clock hands are hours after they were a minute ago (it reads 12:00, now, instead of 9:00). He examines his textbook and discovers he has created a flip book (freaking forty pages of flip book - just flowers, growing and dying - flowers). He flushes, skin stretching against his dulled cheekbones, and he worries his lower lip.

He closes the book, but the girl beside him grins as she packs her pencils away. "I like your flowers," she hushes, eyes flitting to Suga's, and he clenches his nails into his palms. Her smile suggests that is not all she likes, and Suga can feel his back tingling, feel his hands go numb. He should not get nervous for her, he does not even like her, does not even like any girl . . . He does not.

He gulps and rushes out the classroom, stale feet carrying him along the passage until he's collapsed in the spinning chair again, heaving, tearing his hair out and screaming whispering  screams because never has he admitted it . . . Never.

He cannot think anything after that. He cannot even remember if he left his textbook on his desk, or his lunch at home, so he sits - spins, sometimes - and steadies the breath that will not be tamed. There is a fire in his lungs. He drowns in it. It curls him inward until he is no longer human but some introverted being, and he rasps nonsense through his aching throat. He shakes, trembles, falls off the spinning chair and curls up more until he is three feet long and can hide under any bed and be the monster there, with his white teeth and lashes, clear eyes and nails. His height is at the feet of all others, and he has forgotten how to stand.

* * *

Daichi's never seen silver hair before. He walks into the classroom and realizes they are one in the same and that he knows the someone, learns with him and the same teachers teach them both, but he knows nothing . . . Nothing of who he is and who that someone is.

He reads an American novel under his desk when he can get away with it, and listens barely, but mostly watches the nape of silver as it shifts forward and back and never still. It is an impatient nape, and it gathers in the middle where Daichi's is straight, and it is blotchy, cream, and ghastly white, and Daichi cannot focus. He blinks, blinks fast until the words of his novel blend together, and then he looks up and the clock reads 12:00. Another blur darts across the room, and he realizes, minutes after, that it was a silver blur, and that the room is abandoned by all but himself, and the desks are cleared, all but one. The someone's desk is cluttered with pinks and purples that are pencils and an English textbook that is worn of pages and heavy in his palms (he did not realize he had stood until he picked it up, and then he looked across the room as if it were a chasm he had crossed, and he did). 

The window is open. It blows six bitter gusts before settling, and he wonders why the room is so warm if the winter air is flooding so, but he dismisses this thought. On the last gust, the pages flutter open and turn, turn: _whish, whi whi whi ba da ba_ . . . A field is before him, penned and smudged, but it goes on and on until a blossom sprouts, and the rain raises it up, and it dies then, too sudden. 

He stuffs the pencils away, into the desk, and carries the textbook under his shoulder, and his feet ache in his too-small slippers until he finally sits on the hard bed of the Nurse's office. His vision is white, has been white since he left the classroom, and it replays the scene inside the book, of the little purple flower thriving and then decaying so suddenly. His vision clears and his ears open, and he hears the click clack of the Nurse's heels but also the wretched sobs of the floor.

He stands too quickly. Head spinning, his knees hit the floor, and he is only as tall as the foot of the bed, but still he towers over the collapsed someone, and he wishes his hands were smaller to better comfort him.

He guides his hand to the someone's back and sits him up against the wall. There is a bruise on his forehead, round, and his nails are chewed bloody. "Hello," he says, but he does not ask if he is okay. "Do you need any help?"

This conflicted the someone. He clenched his eyes, and few tears escaped, but when they opened it was a flood. He nodded his head once, but then a steel coated his eyes and he spat, regretfully, "No."

* * *

His wrists feel thin all morning. He shakes his head and tries to quiet all the thoughts that plague him. He stares at the mirror, from his toes to his ashy hairline, and can only stand there a moment longer before turning away. With each step his knees give out, and with each breath, he shudders and has to still his shoulders to make it through the lesson. He can feel eyes on his neck wherever he goes. It aches and itches, and he cannot stop scratching.

He is home and in his room. His feet throb, and his bed is three steps away, but he cannot turn away from the mirror. He circles in the mirror and worries his lip when he sees the bloody mess below his nape. He pulls his fingers away and they are red, and it spreads to the creases in his cuticles. He walks too fast and breathes too fast, and his feet carry him to the bathroom. The metal tap is cold beneath his stained fingers, and water gushes: _sha sha, whish, shish, asha_ . . . it dribbles down his collar when he cups it to the aching rash.

He stares through his pupils in the mirror and wears a scarf to school the next day.

Still, he feels those eyes.

* * *

Dinner is set on the table. Daichi stares it down. Around him his family's cutlery strikes the plates: _clink, inki, seenk, eenk, cink_ . . . This happens every day for two months. His stomach feels on fire, but he does not feed it. That would be giving in.

He sleeps on his back with his hands resting, soothing the churning, and he arrives at school early to flip through the drawn-in textbook that stays in the desk by the window. He cannot focus on his numb hands or the words around him, or even his American novel. All he sees is where those fine, silver hairs end and start, and all he thinks is _what I would not give . . ._

* * *

The school is a tall building, but you would never really know. The windows stack upwards until they hide ten flights of stairs, and Suga pants at the top because he has reached the end: _hah, hih, hah hih, hegh_ . . . There is a door with a latch that he unlocks, and the summer wind bids him back to where he came. He wobbles at the top of the steps, teetering on a heel too precarious for safe, safe. The railing seems a year away, and each wave of his arms only spirals him further backwards, over the edge, and he falls. The impact is hard, but less a crash, more a crunch, and there are arms around him, holding tight. He feels his stomach may burst.

The arms hush, "You're safe - you can stop screaming now," and he does. His ears ring with the last resounding wail, and then silence falls like a curtain around them. His heart thuds, and the arms's shoes squeak, and the trance is broken.

He sighs so heavily, and the arms draw him up, up the step he toppled over and against the wall. He is always against a wall it seems. "You were going to the roof?"

Suga shakes his head numbly, dumbly, than nods it because he was. The arms release him and ask, amused, "Is that a yes or . . . a no?"

He scrubs his face with his hands and laughs with his shoulders, "Roof, yes."

"Why the roof?" The arms slump beside him, shoulders forward and elbows on his knees like it is a comfortable thing to sit next to Suga.

"Heights," he mouths, than says it slowly. He stares forward, down the endless, winding steps. "It makes me feel like more than I am . . . " He feels eyes on his cheek, and the itch is conscious in his pores. He continues, quieter, "And I've always felt . . . less."

He can sense more than see the nod, and he lets out a tight breath. "Understandable. Would you tell me your name?" 

Suga feels eyes on his arms, and, stiffly, he rubs his hands together. The dull, red, marks on his palms sting. "Sugawara Koushi . . . Do you - could you - Help me . . . stand?"

The arms grin with straight white teeth and crinkling eyes (almost black, but brown). "I'm Sawamura Daichi. I'd be happy to assist," and he did.


End file.
